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As recent attacks targeting sensitive, personal information at a number of high-profile institutions have demonstrated, it is not a matter of if, but when you will have to investigate a security breach. The law enforcement and intelligence communities are increasingly called upon to investigate and mitigate cyberthreats, often applying the same tools and met

Very little in life grabs our attention like a shiny new object. The gleam can be irresistible, the glitter mesmerizing. That’s how it is in cybersecurity, where the landscape is almost always dotted with alluringly novel hazards. Brand new threats, fresh twists on old threats — the shiny malicious objects just keep on coming, year in and year out. 201

According to IBM X-Force data on the activity of financial malware operated by organized cybercrime groups, the Ursnif (aka Gozi) banking Trojan was the most active malware code in the financial sector in 2016 and has maintained its dominance through 2017 to date.
Ursnif’s activity is marked by both frequent code modifications and campaign activity in

It’s been nearly six months since the WannaCry ransomware stole global headlines and thousands of security practitioners flocked to threat intelligence feeds to help streamline their investigations. While the security community has learned many valuable lessons from the attack, it’s impossible to say that a strike of this magnitude won’t ha

On Tuesday morning, Oct. 24, 2017, organizations in Russia and Ukraine reported being hit with a ransomware outbreak that paralyzed their operations. Sporadic cases were also recorded in Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria and Japan, according to reports from different sources.
The malware, self-titled Bad Rabbit, is a ransomware code designed to encrypt and lock file

IBM X-Force Research recently discovered a small-scale malware campaign involving a Neutrino bot, aka Kasidet, dropping a payload that contains two Zeus malware breeds: Atmos and Zberp. Both of these codes are based on the leaked source code of the Zeus V2 banking Trojan that was exposed publicly in 2011.
The Zberp Trojan, which is a subvariant of ZeusVM mix

What’s the connection between cybercrime and cryptocurrencies? Perhaps it would suffice to say that the reasons for criminals adopting the cryptocoin are quite obvious. But when did this all start, and what fuels it and gets fueled in return? This blog will go over some of the historical reasons that connect cybercrime and cryptocurrency as well as exa

News about POS malware breaches affecting two retailers hit the headlines last week, this time featuring a fast-food restaurant chain in the U.S. that operates around 3,500 locations across the country, most of which are franchised, and a popular supermarket.
Both entities, like others before them, were notified of suspicious activity by a third-party servic

Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing and controlling threats to an organization. It is also a way to increase the security maturity of an organization. Risk management allows you to think about security more strategically and answer the questions that come from your company board, such as:
How many times was the organization attacked?
Is

It’s now easier than ever to make threat intelligence from IBM X-Force Exchange actionable. Since its inception in 2015, X-Force Exchange has provided both granular indicators of compromise and higher-order intelligence through public collections to help shorten security investigations.
A recent update to the X-Force Exchange collaborative platform no

As The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, some clients of cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft are accidentally leaving their cloud databases exposed due to misconfigurations of their services. Coupled with recent headline-making breaches, it’s becoming clear that the greatest risks to an organization might come down to a simple

Since we last reported on a version of the ELF Linux/Mirai malware containing cryptocurrency coin-mining tools in April, the IBM X-Force has noticed a steep increase in the volume of coin central processing unit (CPU) mining tools used in cyberattacks, specifically those targeting enterprise networks.
According to IBM Managed Security Services (MSS) data,

Indicators of compromise (IoCs) are artifacts such as file hashes, domain names or IP addresses that indicate intrusion attempts or other malicious behavior. These indicators consist of:
Observables — measurable events or stateful properties; and
Indicators — observables with context, such as time range.
IoCs are crucial for sharing threat information and

The IBM X-Force Vulnerability Database (XFDB), which holds over 100,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, is chock-full of insights concerning the cybersecurity threat landscape. Much of the data is publicly available directly on the IBM X-Force Exchange platform and can be accessed by users anytime.
In reviewing the database on an ongoing basis, the IBM

Full disclosure: I would not eat guacamole for years because a certain puppet-centric movie I saw as a child had me convinced that it was actually made of frog brains. Once in college, however, seeing guacamole being made completely changed my opinion — unlike a sausage-making demonstration in a rather unfortunate public speaking class that same year of coll